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"A Mess of Pork"I got off the bus at a town called Somerset, in Kentucky, and went to the post office. I wanted to see if my picture was there. It was. A tall man looked at me with his dead blue eyes, and I was afraid. I went outside, but he did not follow me. I stood still in the street, and I heard a man say, “He didn’t have a gun. He fell on his face.”“Six children, they say,” another man said. “They run after the other one. They left him for the hogs.”“Did they mess him up?” “Some. His wife come with the dog before they’d done much damage.” I walked over to the men. They were throwing bags of mail into a truck with Mount Victory written on the door.“Howdy,” the taller man said. “Aim to go out?”“Yes,” I said.“You’re new,” he said.“Yes,” I said.“That store is locked. The same travelin’ man never comes twice,” he said. I sat in the cab with the mail-carrier and the other man. They didn’t talk much.“Know him well?” the other passenger said after a time.“Knowed of him,” the mail-carrier said. “Tred Fairchild was a good man. Steady goin’. Made good liquor.”“The law’s the law,” the other man said.“Hell,” the mail-carrier answered, and spat between his teeth. November dark comes early in the hills. Ten miles out the lights were turned on. Mount Victory was twenty-seven miles away. Down there twenty-seven miles is a long way. The roads are full of ruts and holes and rocks bigger than a man. I couldn’t tell much about the country. I saw little stunted cedars and limestone rocks, then sand- stone and pine. We crossed a creek.
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He stood there and looked down the cliffs into the holly trees, and I thought of the black boar in his pen. I thought of the teeth in the skull on the crib door, and I quit wanting the holly berries. I wanted to take the walnuts and go away.“I wish I could see one,” the boy said, and he talked in a whisper now. “Them hogs are the stillest things. They’re all in their holes un- der the sand rocks, asleep.”“We’d better get home,” I said. “They never come up here,” he said. “They stay in the valleys, and eat beechnuts, or go over to Cumberland and eat pig nuts and acorns. There they don’t bother much unless you have a dog. They hate dogs.”I looked down the cliffs again. It was like a room down there. A man might climb down but not up. I was glad I’d asked about the path.When we were started home Les pointed over the ridge toward Rockcastle. “See that old chimney?” he said. “That’s in the mouth of Holy Creek. People lived there maybe a hundred years ago. They raised hogs to send to Georgia, so my granma said.”
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did not kill the black boar. Every day I gave him corn, and every evening the woman went to stand and watch him eat.It was a cold winter that year. The woman’s had no shoes. She made moccasins from the skin of a calf we had killed.There was no flour or sugar in the house. We ate pork and molasses and fodder beans and cornbread. Sometimes the lesser children cried with the cold, but the mother and the older ones never complained.It was a cold night late in January, and the woman and I sat by the fire. She had sent the children away to bed. “How much money it they would pay for you?” she said, and looked into the coals.“A thousand dollars,” I said. “Do you trust me?” she said, and turned and looked at me. “Yes,” I said. She took a stubby pencil from the mantel, and a piece of brownpaper bag. She smoothed the paper slowly on her knee. She wet the pencil with her tongue. She looked into the fire. She talked. She did not talk to me. “They’ll come alone—the greedy devils—they’ll tell none. They don’t know me. I’ll be Julie Meece.”She wet the pencil again. This time she talked to me. “I can’t spell all the words. Can you spell?” “Yes,” I said. I spelled Rockcastle, and February, and chimney, and secret, and Ransom Ledbetter, and sunrise. Then I addressed the letter. I wrote “Andrew Combs, Somerset, Kentucky” on a crumpled envelope. The next day Les took four eggs for a stamp, and went over to Rockcastle to the post office and mailed it.
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